If you write about dragons and elves nobody gives you a hard time. They know that as an author you’ve created a world in which magic and imagination is a given. Nobody wants to know if you really believe in dragons. Such stories spring from a time when fear and mystery were as close as the sod walls around us and the starbright sky undimmed by local light. What Tolkein did was give his imagined world legitimacy by drawing on the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon story-telling tradition he knew so well.

            If you write about ghosts, readers are more curious. ‘Are you taking this business of survival after death seriously?’ they wonder. Of course many authors don’t. They write cosy fantasies in which ghosts pop up in village bookshops or musty mansions without explanation and behave like your dear departed uncle. Or perhaps they talk like a bitter party crasher with a grievance, wanting revenge, redemption or the family silverware.

            I’ve got nothing against these ghost stories. They can be fun if you’re in the mood. The thing is, they aren’t spooky.

            That’s a good word: ‘spooky’. Roald Dahl used it as a badge of quality after reading seven hundred traditional ghost stories for a TV series he was pitching. The best stories, he felt had this quality of making the hairs on your neck stand up and your eyes widen. When this happens, the reader is buying into the possibility that ghosts are real—that there is some way, in our notion of the universe and the world around us, that such things could happen.

            That was easier when the modern ghost story came along in the wake of the American Civil War. There was a miasma of death and grief that pervaded everyone’s consciousness, and it flourished in a climate of religious belief that ranged from devotion to wary skepticism. There was room in established religions for variations on the supernatural theme: maybe there was a heaven, a hell, and a wandering plane between. The ghost story clichés followed: translucent spectres, cold rooms, tunnels of light… The woman in white floating down a darkened staircase is so compelling an image that you almost demand it.

            Along comes our modern world and science has made a lot of the shadows retreat. An author can’t even depend upon a readership made receptive to the supernatural by religious belief. 

            But science hasn’t banished mystery; it may not be as close as our walls any more, but it’s out there still. It seems the more we learn about ‘reality’ the more difficulty we have grasping it. There’s all that stuff about the universe popping out of absolutely nothing, quantum entanglement and so on. One idea that got me was the notion that gravity can be explained as the tendency of all things to flow to the place where time passes most slowly. It’s another way of expressing proven observations about the relativity of time.

            What I like about this way of expressing things is that it places time at the centre of the mystery—and that’s where the ghost story has a chance to flourish again. For me, time is the greatest mystery. As a student of English Literature I was immersed in the past to such an extent that I could almost imagine myself living there. There are narrow, very specific moments in history where I find myself curiously at home, and there is a longing they give me, much like nostalgia, except that as often as not, these moments existed before I was born.

            Before I start sounding like a new age flake, I want to remind you that I’m coming to all this as a story teller. I want to evoke that kind of eerie feeling of a presence just at the edges of our perception, and I’m exploring my own experience of life as a guide. I’m writing a fourth book in the Requiem series and once again I find myself delving into a world in which time is a weave rather than a wave, a quiver rather than an arrow.

– Doug